Satire and Secrecy in English Literature from 1650 to 1750

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 1-19

3. A History of Secrecy

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 21-45

4. Toward a Theory of Satire I: Gossip and Slander

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 47-66

5. Toward a Theory of Satire II: Secret History

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 67-89

6. Contracts and Promises: Speech Acts, Sex Acts, and Don Juan

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 91-114

7. Satire and Secrecy: Rereading The New Atalantis, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 115-144

8. ‘A Life by Stealth’: Autobiographical Satire in Manley, Swift, and Pope

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 145-175

9. Conclusion

   • Melinda Alliker Rabb

   Pages 177-188

10. Back Matter

    Pages 189-235

    PDF

This book revises assumptions about satire as a public, masculine discourse derived from classical precedents, in order to develop theoretical and critical paradigms that accommodate women, popular culture, and postmodern theories of language as a potentially aggressive, injurious act. Although Habermas places satirists like Swift and Pope in the public sphere, this book investigates their participation in clandestine strategies of attack in a world understood to be harboring dangerous secrets. Authors of anonymous pamphlets as well as major figures including Behn, Dryden, Manley, Swift, and Pope, share at times what Swift called the writer's "life by stealth."

• English
• English literature
• gender
• history
• history of literature
• literature
• Pope
• satire
• women
• British and Irish Literature

"The significance of Satire and Secrecy would be in its suggestion of an explanatory/critical model for reading post-Augustan satire that brings a conception of secrecy (with its various employment of gossip, slander, secret history, and so on) into the picture as a key satiric strategy. Rabb's view of satiric secrecy would open up doors of understanding for numerous texts. Her study, provocatively and broadly contemplates a conceptual revision of the public/private divide." - Ruben Quintero, California State University, Los Angeles

Melinda Alliker Rabb is Associate Professor of English and American Literatures and Language at Brown University.

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